Re: Friend class/function

On Sun, 2015-11-01 at 17:04 +0100, georges wrote: > I recently discovered ​the "friendship concept" in c++ and i really > love the concept. > And i wonder if the php internals would be interested to implements it > in the next 7.x major version. Could you provide use cases where this provides a better interface than other alternatives? I think there are only very few cases ... In C++ the primary use-case are binary operators which have to be written as a free function but need access to private elements. i.e. class Complex { int _real, _im; public: Complex(int r, int i) : _real(r), _im(i) {} friend Complex operator+(int a, const Complex& b); }; Complex operator+(int a, const Complex& b) { return Complex(a + b._real, b._im); } Here the operator+(int, const Complex&) can't be part of a class as the first operand is a built-in while logically it belongs to the class's interface. (note: this specific example isn't good as we could provide accessors to the real and imaginary part of our complex number but there are cases where this isn't possible/wanted) We don't have this situation in PHP, though. johannes

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